Real "Heaven Is For Real" Family from a US Route 6 town: Imperial, Nebraska

I just came across this article from AARP.Com by Bill Newcott.  I have to say that Imperial, NE charmed me in many ways - and one of them was the friendliness of the people there.  Carolyn Lee of the Imperial Republican interviewed me, and I had breakfast with several senior citizens who both cracked me up and made me wonder how people out here "in the middle of nowhere" could be so worldly. Imperial itself was a surprise: so remote, yet fully wired.  The whole town  - all one main street of it - was in internet hotspot.

Now, this new movie is bound to bring attention to this little town on the border of Eastern Colorado, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about that.  I suppose "protective" would be the closest thing.
Read the following, and if you want to read more, click this link to the page.

And if you want to read my original post about my stay in Imperial in mid June 2011,  check it out here.

From AARP:

Heaven Is for Real is the story of the Burpos’ son Colton, now 14, who at 4 nearly died from a ruptured appendix. During his time on a hospital operating table, he later told his parents, he experienced a trip to Heaven where he heard angels singing and sat on the lap of Jesus. The Burpos dismissed the accounts as a child’s Sunday school-fed fantasy until Colton started telling them about visits with people he’d never even known about — people like Todd’s grandfather, who had died decades earlier, and a daughter the Burpos lost in a miscarriage before they had Colton.

Bill Newcott pulls up a pew with Sonja and Todd Burpo.

It was an intensely personal family experience that Todd says he didn’t even want to write about at first. But then, “People I didn’t even know would come up, knock on our door, and say ‘God told me to tell you that you should write a book.’ I heard it so much, I began to think maybe these people weren’t crazy, and maybe it was what God wanted me to do. But I was resisting it all the way.

“So I said to God, ‘I’m not going to call anyone from the publishing world. If they discover me here in little Imperial, Nebraska, I’ll write the book.’ I felt I was pretty safe. Then I got a phone call: ‘You don’t know who I am, but I’m with a literary agency and I’ve heard about your son’s story. I’d like to help you write a book.’ ”